Smile Nihongo Academy (Yuko Sensei) and Tokini Andy Japanese Course?

6 comments

1. I’m currently taking Tokini Andy one. I’m enjoying the structure and content. Currently Im doing a Genki chapter a week by following his videos and recommendations. And Im using wanikani and anki for vocabulary and kanji. Each chapter in tokini’s course has: vocub review, grammar lesson, lots of shadowing practice, book group exercises, immersion reading/listening provided by them, time to complete Genki workbook. Good structure and content, I feel like I’m going much faster that we previous resources I was using. I’m currently at week 4

2. I say this to anyone asking about paid for online courses;

   There’s a near limitless amount of free online materials, whether it be your standard website, YouTube, podcasts or Anki for example.

   So when it comes to paid for courses, ask yourself this:

   Are they offering something you can’t get elsewhere for free? The big one being feedback and pointers.

   If all they’re offering are videos, it’s just YouTube with their own interface. You’re paying for something you can easily get somewhere else for free.

   If you’re looking for structure, get yourself a copy of your textbook of choice and search the chapter and lesson number on YouTube. Just now I searched “genki 1 lesson 5” and there are sooo many videos helping explain it.

3. For Tokini Andy, check out his free YT Genki videos. They form the backbone of his course.

   If you like those videos then consider signing up for the course.

   I personally think he’s great.

4. I actually just signed up right now. I’ve been meaning to try it for a while but kept putting it off. I really like his Youtube videos and wanted to see what other materials he has. PS: Use promo code STARTOVER for $5 off your first month.

   I’m personally up to Chapter 16 in Genki in my studies, but wanted both a comprehensive review of previous materials as well as to begin speaking+listening more. I also want more guidance going forwards to keep me on track as I expect to begin the Quartet books later this year.

   Here’s my quick overview I’m typing up as I go through the site for the first time.

   ### The Library

   The content is broken up into “Courses”. There’s a course for Genki I, Genki II, Quartet I && II together, an Immersion Material Course, a Community course, a Review by Grammar Point for N5 course, and Podcast & transcripts course.

   I jumped into Genki I Lesson 1. There’s a buttload of sections! Vocabulary, grammar stream (the one you get free on Youtube), immersion material, bonus sentences and grammar, textbook practice, listening & shadow practice, challenges, and tests. As well as sections just to track your completion of the workbook exercises. It’s really well broken up IMO and gives a ton of guidance on how to proceed through the chapter.

   I’m not going to watch everything fully right now, but here’s my super high level impressions. Based on a quick sampling.

   ### Course videos

   For vocabulary the video has Yuki (Andy’s wife) for native pronunciation and shadowing, as well as Andy’s pronunciation. Bonus sentences and grammar is for listening and shadow of the dialogues from the Youtube video, as well as even more sentences. Again it has Yuki for native audio. Listening & Shadowing does textbook dialogues as well as his stream dialogues. There’s a Textbook Practice video where they do the partner exercises from the books too. Every video seems to have an audio download available, as well as pdfs with content.

   The Challenge for lesson 1 is an exercise from Genki, and they encourage you to upload audio or video of yourself for them to review and correct. They say it takes up to a week for them to review. The Test looks like a Google Form built as a test. The first page was a vocabulary multiple choice. A comment on the page suggests there were some “choose the correct sentence” type questions later. I didn’t want to go through it to see what the rest of the test was like, but it seems like a nice way to “wrap up” a lesson and see how you do.

   The videos and sections can be marked as complete when you’re done which is nice for tracking.

   ### Immersion

   Honestly this is what I was most interested in other than the shadowing practice. I wanted more graded readers and listening targeted specifically to content I knew. Lesson 1 has 10 graded readers and they’re marked from easy to hard. There is a link to some suggested tadoku readers, and then the rest look to be custom crafted for this course, and I believe I heard somewhere that Yuki writes and illustrates them. You can disable furigana, and hard words are highlighted. There’s a vocabulary list at the end. Some of them are fully illustrated and some are just a cover picture with text. They all have native audio recording. I jumped ahead to Chapter 16 since that’s where I am, and there are four stories and no specific tadokus suggested. They’re also not ranked by difficulty like in chapter 1. The stories seem to be about 2-3 minutes in length for recordings, but obviously will take me longer to actually read them.

   These only go through Genki, with nothing for Quartet right now.

   ### Review by grammar point

   For the first 11 chapters of Genki, there’s reviews for each grammar point broken out. I chose XはYです to look into. There’s a new 10 minute explanation video w/ Yuki. There’s a splice of the youtube stream section for the point if you just want to see that bit. There’s four practice videos with more dialogues and skits, a couple suggestions for challenges to do, and links to extra resources.

   These only go up to Genki chapter 11 right now.

   ### Podcasts

   I honestly had no idea this was a thing. You can get the audio and transcripts. It looks like both are 100% in Japanese. I jumped ahead and tried listening. It’s hard for me to estimate difficulty because I’m still a beginner, but they speak at a normal seeming pace and clearly. There looks to be about 30 videos from 30-50 minutes in length (just from clicking a few).

   ### Community

   It’s on a site called kajabi, which is probably a forums type thing. It looks like the main feature is “Challenges” which are things like recording yourself reading, watching anime, reading stories, studying vocabulary, etc… basically to help keep you on track and trying things. There are also some forum type posts and discussions.

   It doesn’t seem too active on the kajabi site, but the Discord serve has something like ~4k users and ~1k active right now. A quick scan in some of the channels for asking questions shows a lot of activity, even for things like helping correct sentences people write. It seems lively and helpful at first glance.

   ## Overall thoughts

   I can’t really review it yet until I really dive in and start experiencing it more fully. I think the value for me will really hinge on how good the bonus content is. The free grammar videos on Youtube are already amazing, and OTONavi comes with native audio for vocabulary and dialogues already I theoretically could be using for shadowing although it’s not explicitly designed for that the way Andy’s videos are. The ability to upload yourself doing challenges and get actual corrective feedback is probably going to be very valuable. The immersion content seems nice although I haven’t read any yet to see if the content is interesting or relevant. The Quartet materials are somewhat lacking compared to the quantity of Genki ones, which hopefully is something they’re actively working on.

   Overall I think it has a lot of great supplementary materials which are targeted specifically at Genki learners. I know in going through other resources like the tadoku readers and Satori readers, it can be difficult to find something which is in that sweet spot of reinforcing what you know without introducing too many new things and overwhelming you. This seems like a good way to expand the amount of practice you get that’s specific to what you’re learning. With the amount of extra content and textbook practice videos it’s probably as close to a classroom experience as you’d get without actually being in one.

5. I’m currently doing lesson 12 in Tokini Andy’s course. It is FANTASTIC. This is the last chapter of Genki I and I’ll be continuing his course all the way through the end of Genki II. The extra grammar videos, shadowing, and immersion sections are very much worth the annual subscription. Highly recommend if you’re using Genki as your textbook.

6. Andy seems like a really chill dude I he reminds me of go billy Korean